Does the Same Failure Bring the Same Reputational Damage? An Examination of Motivated Reasoning, US Federal Agencies, and Media Coverage

• In Event: Experimental Research and Behavioral Public Administration

Abstract

Research Summary
The purpose of this study is to test people’s cognitive process of receiving information about federal agencies and its effect on their judgment of bureaucratic reputation. Particularly, this research focuses on how the agency’s ideology and media partisanship are associated with people’s judgment of the agencies’ negative information. The theoretical framework is based on motivated reasoning and bureaucratic reputation. The methods rely on survey experiments which use a vignette in the form of news article. The names of US federal agencies and news sources were used as treatment. The findings enhance the understanding of citizens understanding federal agencies and political support mechanisms.

Research background
Who wants a bad reputation? As bureaucratic reputation implies the public’s support and approval, which is a source of power and legitimacy, public agencies are arduously trying to protect their reputations (Carpenter, 2001). That means agencies’ reputational concerns shape their interactions with the public. Indeed, previous studies have shown that agencies respond to reputational threats using different communication strategies, changing management practices, and adjusting the timing of decisions (Gilad, et al., 2013). But while the literature on bureaucratic reputation has used media coverage to measure reputational threats, this approach does not fully capture the public’s fragmented and conflicting attitudes at the individual level (Chong & Druckman, 2007). An examination of individual opinions about media coverage would explain the discrepancy between aggregate views news media deliver and multiple audiences’ distinctive individual opinions.
To analyze the individual-level formation of bureaucratic reputation, this study adopted motivated reasoning theory as theoretical framework, as information and people’s prior beliefs are two main factors that construct agency reputation (Maor, 2016). While motivated reasoning theory emphasizes how people’s goal motivations involve in their reasoning process, this study particularly focuses on the partisan motivated reasoning, meaning that partisanship drives people’s interpretation of political information. (Taber & Lodge, 2006). In fact, media sources and federal agencies drive peoples political bias, as the agencies’ functions are rooted in people’s contrasting political views and people’s expectation of media bias influenced people’s judgment of the information (Iyengar & Hahn, 2009).

Hypothesis
H1. Agency ideology hypothesis: People are more tolerant of ideologically matched agencies than unmatched agencies after reading a negative news article.
H2: Media ideology hypothesis: People are influenced more strongly by ideologically matched news sources after seeing a negative news article.
H3: Agency-media ideology hypothesis: The effect of people’s motivated reasoning on reputation judgment varies according to the ideological match between news sources and federal agencies.

Methods and Design
This research proposes to use a vignette survey experiment to test the effects of US citizens’ motivated partisan reasoning on their judgments of a federal agency’s reputation. Approximately 300 respondents recruited from Mturk on January 2019 were blocked randomized first based on self-identified partisanship—Republicans or Democrats—and then received one of four different treatments randomly. The treatment contained a news article that features either the name of an ideologically (un)matched federal agency or (un)matched news source. This study considers the Department of Defense (DOD) a right-wing agency and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) a left-wing agency, which is a categorization previous research has supported (Clinton et al., 2012). The news sources included as treatments are: MSNBC and Fox News, which reputedly are biased politically in favor of liberals and conservatives, respectively (Levendusky, 2013). The vignette design contains a negative statement of federal agencies in the form of a realistic news article. After reading the vignettes, respondents received questionnaires asking them to rate the public agency’s reputation using the Bureaucratic Reputation Scale (Lee and Van Ryzin, 2019).

Results and Conclusion
The results show that the reputation score of the EPA from Democrats is significantly lower than that of the DOD after they read negative news articles, which is the opposite to our hypothesis 1. Also, the findings didn’t support hypothesis 2 that the difference between ideologically matched and unmatched news sources are insignificant. Lastly, the results show that when Democrats received the EPA’s information from CNN, the reputation score was significantly lower than others, which also was the opposite to our hypothesis 3. These findings imply that Democrats go through motivated reasoning processes, while they are not more tolerable but more harsh on ideologically matched federal agency and news source.

Author

• Danbee Lee, Rutgers University